audiobook – Page 36

Someday by Isaac Asimov

SFFaudio News

Last night I discovered that Someday, a wonderful short story by Isaac Asimov, is PUBLIC DOMAIN.

I’ve posted the |PDF| from the original mag to our PDF PAGE (there’re hundreds more there by the way).

Someday set in a future in which everyone is illiterate (Asimov has another story, The Fun They Had, that has a similar premise). It talks about audio vs. video, robotics, artificial intelligence, creativity, empathy, and it has a terrific twist ending.

I think you’ll treasure it as much as I have over the years.

And here’s an audiobook version:

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3:

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Little Black Bag by C.M. Kornbluth

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Little Black Bag is a highly regarded C.M. Kornbluth novelette. It was undeniably influential and popular. It won the 2001 Retro-Hugo Award for “Best Novelette” (of 1951), was voted the 13th best all-time short science fiction story (in a 1971 Analog Science Fact & Fiction poll), and was anthologized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964. Philip K. Dick himself seems to have read it (he had a 1964 short story entitled The Little Black Box).

In his introduction to The Best of C.M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, a friend and frequent collaborator of Kornbluth’s, states that The Marching Morons (see SFFaudio Podcast #112) is a direct sequel to The Little Black Bag. The titular bag is a time-traveled artifact from a future in which the majority of the population is genetically stupid and must be supported by a minority of geniuses who masquerade as assistants to the morons. Thus the bag of the title is filled with self-driven instruments enabling even a complete moron to act as a highly competent doctor.

Three television adaptations of The Little Black Bag have been made: Tales of Tomorrow (1952), Out Of The Unknown (1969), and Night Gallery (1970).

Myself, I think The Little Black Bag is both too well regarded and too popular. It’s popularity suggests that many readers think of themselves as one of the geniuses surrounded by morons. And its being regarded as highly as it is by those geniuses makes me think they are rather stupider than they think.

I invite you to come to your own conclusions.

Escape Pod #429 Little Black Bag
by C.M. Kornbluth; Read by Mat Weller
1 |MP3| – Approx. 1 Hour 16 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Escape Pod
Podcast: January 5, 2014
First published in Astounding, July 1950

Here’s a |PDF| made from it’s original publication.

|ETEXT|

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #260 – AUDIOBOOK: The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #260 – The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, read by Bob Neufeld.

This UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOK (6 hours 40 minutes) comes to us courtesy of LibriVox.org. The Hound Of The Baskervilles was first serialized in The Strand Magazine, August 1901 to April 1902.

The next SFFaudio Podcast will feature our discussion of it!

The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

First published in Harper’s Weekly November 10, 1894 this novella combines the two poles of Doyle’s personality – the skeptic and the dupe. Playing out like a combination of Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla and The Manchurian Candidate. The protagonist, Austin Gilroy, a professor of physiology, meets a woman at a party who can perform frightening feats of mesmerism.

Variously described as being a tale of a “psychic vampire” other editors and anthologists have classified it as “weird fiction” or “horror”

The Parasite
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Read by Delmar H Dolbier
4 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 1 Hour 54 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: 2012

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/7030

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

The Parasite
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Read by Carl Vonnoh, III
4 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 1 Hour 58 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: 2006

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/621

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

And here’s an easy reading |PDF| version (41 pages)

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #258 – READALONG: The Star Rover by Jack London

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #258 – Jesse, Seth, and Maissa discuss The Star Rover (aka The Jacket) by Jack London.

Talked about on today’s show:
titled The Jacket in the UK; astral projection; what about alien past lives; the primordial ooze; the book is a laundry list of Jack London’s interests; structure resembles television flashbacks; knuckle-rap Morse Code; The Count of Monte Cristo; Seth recounts his own past-life story; Jesse and Maissa debate plausibility of reincarnation; Plato and the Land of the Forms; “little death” means something else in French; Ragnar Lodbrok based on Norse Mythology; anachronism; Korean history and turtle ships; Jesse attempts to use the Napoleon Complex to debunk reincarnation; everyman (and everywoman); does reincarnation extend beyond humanity?; “there’s only one soul”; Lucretius, star dust, and the recovery of scrolls from Herculaneum; “souls are totally bogus”; past lives as a metaphor for reading widely; prevalence of the number 40; hallucination; Jack London on surfing; multilingual reference as an indicator of fame; prison reform; interrogation, torture, and Guantanamo Bay; loosely adapted in 2005 film The Jacket; the 1923 silent film adaptation is sadly lost; comparing and contrasting with The Iron Heel; T.C. Boyle’s The Relive Box in The New Yorker; Until the End of the World, a film about reliving dreams; on cultivating sleep; frame narrative; sexism; historical basis for character names; H.P. Lovecraft, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the creative power of dreams; confabulation; Total Recall; “faith in the lordship of my mind”; the odd importance of tobacco; The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells.